was born, I have lived, and I have been made over.” So begins the introduction to Mary Antin’s famous autobiography of her immigration from Belarus to Boston, The Promised Land, first published in 1912. Antin continues, “I am just as much out of the way as if I were dead, for I am absolutely other than the person whose story I have to tell…. My life I have still to live; her life ended when mine began” (1). While Antin’s memoir has often been cast as a narrative of easy assimilation, the seamless integration of a brave new self into a brave new world, these words reference the cost of that journey. Throughout The Promised Land, despite this initial, bold proclamation Antin’s past self is in fact a persistent, however umbral, presence. As many who have approached the book, particularly from a late-twentieth century perspective, now recognize, the melancholy of immigration inevitably and relentlessly seeps into Antin’s recollections.1For example, in Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation, an account of her mid-twentieth-century experience of immigration from Cracow to Canada, published in 1989, the author finds herself feeling “a particular affection” for Antin’s memoir, even as she uncomfortably notes the author’s insistence on “seeing her life as a fable of pure success” (162, 163).2 Hoffman reads between the lines in an effort to unearth what is beneath this narrative “of triumphant progress,” and she finds what she is looking for toward the very end of Antin’s introduction. She points to a telling passage: “It is painful to be consciously of two worlds. The wandering Jew in me seeks forgetfulness. I am not afraid to live on and on, if only I do not have to remember too much” (3).3 Remembering, for Antin as for Hoffman, is an exercise that painfully yields the fragmentary and problematic nature of the experience of assuming a new identity.
But, as Hoffman recognizes, while remembering often causes paralyzing pain, it can also be a redeeming and even liberating force. Looking back, maintaining ties to the past through language, culture, and storytelling, for example, can be a way of orienting the self, of tracing a trajectory, however muddled its path, in order to anchor the present self to its particular version of home. After all, it is in reading Antin’s narrative alongside her own that Hoffman recognizes how much “I am a creature of my time—as she, in her adaptations, was a creature of hers” (162). In returning to this earlier narrative, which is one way of remembering the past, Hoffman excavates otherwise shadowy elements of her own story to reframe her sense of identity as an immigrant, a woman, and a Jew.
Liana Finck’s postassimilationist graphic narrative, A Bintel Brief: Love and Longing in Old New York, published in 2014, is another text that, like Hoffman’s, looks to the past to demonstrate how remembering can be a means of empowerment, of orientation. Composed not as a clear-cut autobiography but rather as an experimental mosaic that straddles the line between fiction and nonfiction, A Bintel Brief additionally reflects the ways graphic narratives can prompt expansive self-explorations through palimpsestic renderings that bridge together past and present versions of a self alongside the real and imagined communities that influence that ever changing self. In other words, what a reading of this graphic narrative suggests is how the medium can open up relational considerations of identity by visualizing the manifold, entangled layers that inform a person’s sense of self, and in this case one’s intersectional Jewish, American, and female identities. Concluding with a brief look at Finck’s unusual graphic exploration offers a glimpse of where mapping one’s dis-affiliations can potentially lead us, particularly when we venture into a world in which the semiautobiographical and the historic meet the fictional and fantastic.
Drawn in a sometimes gothic, sometimes magical realist style, this slim, unpaginated volume is framed by the first-person narrative of its contemporary, unnamed protagonist.4 Her perspective bridges the various assemblies contained in the book: bits of a personal history cast alongside the fancies of an imaginary figure brought back from the past, a collective story molded through an individual outlook, and a text translated from Yiddish to English and adapted from prose to word-image. Through the narrator’s eyes we experience a communal account that has been shaped by a sorting through and selection that conceals as much as it reveals of an early twentieth-century immigrant community. Unlike Hoffman, this narrator’s look back is driven by a metaphorical, rather than literal, sense of herself as an immigrant. Nevertheless, she too is directed to the past by her need for guidance in the present, her desire to figure out where she fits within her own world and particularly what being Jewish in the twenty-first century means to her.
Our unnamed guide begins by describing a book of newspaper clippings passed on to her by her grandmother. Although she cannot read the content of these clippings, since the Hebrew lettering drawn across the cover of the volume eludes her, this does not pose much of a problem, as a spectral presence leaps out of the pages of the old notebook the second she opens it (figure C.1). The ghostly figure is none other than a wiry Abraham Cahan, the Lithuanian-born Jewish American man of letters who founded a socialist Yiddish newspaper, the Jewish Daily Forward, in 1897, serving as editor (with a couple of early bumps in the road) from its outset until his death in 1951.5 As the narrator comes to discover, Bintel Brief, translated as “bundle of letters,” was a popular feature of the paper, started in 1906, that included letters from readers, many of whom were immigrants, who would pour their hearts out about their personal lives in the hopes of seeing those stories published and accompanied by a reply from the editor. The replies were anonymous, in the sense that no particular name or person was attached to them, and they were originally published in a different typeface from the letters (Nakhimovsky 161). These characteristics of the exchange distanced Forward readers from their respondent, allowing them to imagine this figure as what Seth Lipsky has called a “sympathetic, seasoned voice, an enlightened cousin who had been in America just that much longer and could serve as a guide to the country’s strange ways” (85). Unlike Mary Antin, whose best-selling memoir was aimed at an American audience and originally appeared in installments in the Atlantic Monthly, Abraham Cahan established Bintel Brief as a kind of interactive platform for, by, and about a close-knit Jewish immigrant community, however imaginary that community. It is this sense of connection and affiliation that our narrator, another “wandering Jew,” seeks out with her supernatural creation; she too is in search of a guide to tether her to this otherwise indistinct and shadowy identity.
In Finck’s text the ghostly Abe Cahan is a familiar, friendly, and often even sweet presence who fishes for pickles and kugel in the narrator’s refrigerator, even as he remains a distant and untouchable “otherworldly” figure—a heart-shaped symbol of the past with a hat floating over his head like an intellectual’s halo. He introduces the narrator to a city she has not seen before, describing, as they walk around, landmarks from his day: “the dancehalls, the cafes where Yiddish poets gathered, the sweatshops.” Our ever dislocated narrator notes how after a while “the year 1906 started to seem more real to me than my own time.”
C.1 Liana Finck, panel from introduction. A Bintel Brief, n.p. A BINTEL BRIEF: LOVE AND LONGING IN OLD NEW YORK by LIANA FINCK. Copyright © 2014 by Liana Finck. Reprinted courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers.
Indeed, this observation is especially telling considering how little we learn about her life, or her “own time,” over the course of the book. The details that emerge are sparse: where she lives—a small, minimally furnished apartment—her love of sushi take-out, and, above all, her thirst for the stories Cahan translates for her.6 She comes to life as she listens to these old stories, all of them half-tales or beginnings. “What happened?” she repeatedly asks of the characters she learns about through these letters. “Where are they now?” The narrator’s curiosity grows throughout the text, even as it remains repeatedly unsatisfied. Similarly, readers of Finck’s A Bintel Brief come to crave more information about this mysterious narrator, although those cravings too remain unfulfilled.
The few historical details we gather about the narrator, like those we grasp about Bintel Brief writers more generally, furnish us with a powerful sketch of her past that neither fills in the gaps nor suggests where that past might lead. For example, early in the book, when the imaginary Abe Cahan starts to read to her, he licks a “transparent” finger to turn a page of the notebook. This gesture reminds her of her own grandfather, and in the following panel he is pictured sitting beside her, reading the children’s picture book Goodnight Moon (figure C.2). The notebook itself, we discover in an epilogue to the book, was put together by her great-grandfather, a “paper hoarder” who wanted to pass on his archive of daily newspapers to his daughter, but selected his favorite clippings at his wife’s insistence, so as not to “drown” this daughter in his paper archive.
These bits of information—particular moments from the narrator’s history that do not necessarily or easily piece together—are disclosed in snippets throughout the text. Together they paint a picture of a person whose life is lived most intensely in fantasy and memory and whose outlook seems most powerfully shaped by the texts passed on to her: picture books, a notebook, the remnants of an archive. Other than a fictional Abe Cahan and her grandmother (who shows up in the epilogue), we never see her interact with anyone from her present life. In some ways she is everything Antin tries to suppress in her own narrative: a self who lives by and through remembering, who remembers perhaps too much, as Antin struggled not to do. Yet, it is this very remembering, this ability to be moved by stories from the past, that suggests the potential for artistry and transformation that shapes the book, a potential that persistently returns this narrator, as well as her readers, confidently into the present of her own creations.
In eleven chapters interwoven between the present-day fantasy story, the narrator is powerfully moved and impressed by selected stories from Bintel Brief. Within these diversely designed story lines, each cast in a slightly different style, format, and color scheme, we witness tales of people, all, to borrow from Antin’s whispered words, painfully conscious of two worlds. This consciousness takes the form of emotional and material “hungers,” as Anzia Yezierska, another famous turn-of-the-century Jewish immigrant writer, termed them. While so many details of the letter writers’ lives—including their fates—are absent from these letters, we still glean an overwhelming sense of a community steeped in poverty, illness, shame, and loneliness. The unfulfilled needs and desires of these writers emerge more potently perhaps because of the fragmentary nature of these stories without endings. The original Bintel Brief provided its readers with a chance, however short-lived, to voice their hungers, even if those hungers often would never be satisfied. Finck’s A Bintel Brief generates an afterlife for those voices. As readers, we simply but powerfully witness them, our own still unfolding stories, like our narrator’s, imbricated in these ancestral half-lives.
C.2 Liana Finck, panel from introduction. A Bintel Brief, n.p. A BINTEL BRIEF: LOVE AND LONGING IN OLD NEW YORK by LIANA FINCK. Copyright © 2014 by Liana Finck. Reprinted courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers.
She leads the way. Cahan reads the first letter to her, involving a stolen watch, a stealthy neighbor, and a family on the verge of hunger. After presenting the editor’s relatively formulaic response to the letter writer, composed in a polished typeface that contrasts with the letter’s expressive graphic translation, we return to the story of our narrator and the ghostly Cahan. In a moving panel we see large tears running down her face as she admits, “I feel like she was speaking just to me” (figure C.3). Our narrator’s emotional receptivity somehow becomes the central story, a state that, over the course of the text, includes everything from a sense of connection and excitability to disturbance and ennui; despite its continual modifications, this powerful emotional presence is perceptible in every line inscribed in the book. Indeed, as we experience her reactions to these letters, they come to inform the way we read the letters themselves. It becomes impossible to separate our guide from the world that she has drawn, and drawn us into. The narrative framework bleeds into the very story it seeks to enclose.
C.3 Liana Finck, panel from final page of chapter 1. A Bintel Brief, n.p. A BINTEL BRIEF: LOVE AND LONGING IN OLD NEW YORK by LIANA FINCK. Copyright © 2014 by Liana Finck. Reprinted courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers.
Perhaps the most moving section of the text comes late, when the narrator, who has begun to lose her imaginary, now assimilating Cahan to the “modern world,” sets out on her own to look at original issues of the Forward. Perusing microfilm at the New York Public Library, what she finds herself most drawn to, in large part because she cannot read the Yiddish, is a series of photographs, termed “The Gallery of Missing Husbands.” As she explains, “I found out later that the pictures were of men who had abandoned their families or disappeared. So many women were writing to the Bintel Brief with pictures of their delinquent husbands and notes pleading with them to come home that ‘A Gallery of Missing Husbands’ spun off and became its own newspaper feature.” In Finck’s A Bintel Brief the narrative is suddenly ruptured when we are presented, in its own unnumbered chapter, with ten black-and-white etchings based on photographs from this gallery feature. Each sketch depicts the close-up of a man cast against a shadowy background, with a first name and age carefully drawn at the corner of each image (figure C.4). As Finck described the “very physical process” of creating these etchings: “It’s very labor intensive. I felt intense emotions while I was making them because it involved scratching” (personal communication, September 27, 2013). These recastings of photographs from the gallery become the author/narrator’s way of inscribing herself into the past. In a sense, by reshaping these documents and inserting them into this contemporary story of a young Jewish woman’s search for identity and belonging, suppressed and otherwise invisible experiences from the past suddenly become perceptible. With these etchings, though we are looking at the faces of the missing husbands, we feel the loss and pain of the women who sent these material pleas to the paper in the first place. This is no small feat, considering how marginalized women’s voices often were in that early twentieth-century Jewish immigrant community.7
Ultimately, Finck’s narrator too emerges as another one of these abandoned women, as her imaginary Cahan fades out. She relates this loss of her imaginary friend with an inability to connect with her Jewish identity. As she narrates in a significant passage included toward the end of the book, after the fantastical Cahan has mysteriously disappeared just as quickly as he once appeared: “Editor, my spirit has left me and I don’t know who I am anymore. I need your advice.” She then searches for the ghostly Cahan in what she terms “the most unlikely places,” including an “abandoned Jewish deli,” an “abandoned pickle factory,” an “abandoned synagogue.” These settings reveal how her journey, and more generally her turn to and investment in the past, is primarily driven by the search for a Jewish sense of self. When she is unsuccessful in finding Cahan, she narrates, “I joined a synagogue, / started learning Yiddish at the Workmen’s Circle, / and even danced the hora when I got the chance.” Such gestures reflect a self groping for a connection, a sense of identity, that is as elusive as it is urgent. But while she does not locate Cahan, the search itself puts her in touch with a community of lost souls who, like her, just want the opportunity to be seen and heard.
C.4 Liana Finck, page from “The Gallery of Missing Husbands.” A Bintel Brief, n.p. A BINTEL BRIEF: LOVE AND LONGING IN OLD NEW YORK by LIANA FINCK. Copyright © 2014 by Liana Finck. Reprinted courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers.
In the end, the narrator of Finck’s A Bintel Brief dis-affiliates from the very past that she revises, trying to find a space for herself, and for shadowy others like her, in her reconstructions. Over the course of the text, the past is made over, but never completely anew. In “The Task of the Translator” Walter Benjamin describes a translated text as part of the original work’s “afterlife”: translation involves both “a transformation and a renewal of something living” (73). Paradoxically, as he explains, in its afterlife “the original undergoes a change.” In A Bintel Brief we can see not only the ways that the past, through many different kinds of translations, can figure into the present but also the ways that the present transforms that past. For Finck’s narrator, as for all the personae addressed in this book, visually mapping the self, even an illusory or preliminary one, is a process of translation. In transcribing the self on the page and exposing the limitations and possibilities tied to one’s sense of location and dislocation, of home and not home, that self, and the spaces it seeks to inhabit, is transformed. Revisiting and revising the past in the present is a way for Jewish women to create spaces in which to dwell.
